(hopefully) simple RAID question

[mdominic20]

I am looking into putting 4 WD caviar black 1TB drives into a RAID 0 array for speed. My goal is to achieve at least 400MB/s read and write times. My motherboard has 4 available SATA2 ports and 1 available SATA3 port.

Is it better to connect each drive to its own SATA2 port? Or should I somehow run them together into the single SATA3 port? Will there be any bottlenecks either way, or will both solutions give me the same result?

Thanks for your help.

 

[hang-the-9]

You can't connect them into a single port, each drive needs to be connected to it's own connection.

If you want good speed and reliability, get a SATA RAID card with 4 ports. And make sure you have a backup for your data on those drives. Any of the 4 drives die, you will loose all of your data.

 

[chesteracorgi]

It depends on the mobo OEM. The controller on mine doesn't allow for using RAID on the Marvell controller. It does allow RAID on the native Intel controler and SATA II ports.

Check out the mobo specs.

 

[mdominic20]

Thanks for the responses. I will def have a backup drive for the files.

My mobo is ASUS P9X79 PRO, it says it allows for RAID. Am I still better off getting a RAID card?

I notice on a lot of RAID cards there is a miniSAS connection (SFF-8088 or 8087) that combines 4 drives on a single cable. When a RAID card advertises being either 6Gbps or 3Gbps, does that imply a data limit for all 4 drives combined? Or does each drive individually get its own data limit, even though they are sharing one cable and one miniSAS?